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Light One Candle: A Child's Diary of the Holocaust

About the Exhibition

Light One Candle: A Child's Diary of the Holocaust, a striking exhibition based on the book Light One Candle: From Lithuania to Jerusalem, by Solly Ganor, opened in the Joan Constantiner Gallery at the Center for Jewish History in May 2003. This YIVO exhibition features the photographs of George Kadish [Zvi (Hirsh) Kadushin], one of the only Jewish photographers who was able to photograph life in the Kovno ghetto during the war. The exhibition is made possible through the generous support of Cindy and David Stone of the Smart Family Foundation.

As Solly Ganor notes, "George Kadish took every opportunity possible to document life in the ghetto. The result constitutes one of the most significant photographic records of ghetto life during the Holocaust. He is a very special hero."

The exhibit encompasses photos of children in the streets of the ghetto (including one of Ganor as a boy), one of the mass murders of Kovno Jews, and several images taken in Waakirchen, Bavaria, on May 2, 1945, of the Japanese-American troops who liberated Solly Ganor. "It was there that the Japanese-American 522 Artillery Battalion of the United States Third Army liberated us, the remnants of Lithuanian Jewry, while we were on a Death March from Dachau to the Tyrol Mountains," Ganor recalled.

Ganor summed up the importance of this exhibition: "It is the fulfillment of a promise I had made to my friends during the years of the Holocaust. We were a group of young boys and girls in the Kovno Ghetto, in Lithuania... The chances that anyone of us would survive were slim... we made a solemn promise to each other, a neder, that those who would survive the Holocaust would tell our story to the world. I kept my promise..."

The exhibition also features photographs of Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Kovno, Lithuania (1939-1940) who issued thousands of life-saving visas, and whom Ganor met as a young boy.

Light One Candle is on display through September 27, 2003 in the Joan Constantiner Gallery at the Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th Street in New York City. The viewing hours are Monday to Thursday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Friday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.; and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

For more information about Solly Ganor and his memoir, see his web page, Remembrance.